This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.
The recent deaths of unarmed African Americans at the hands of police in cities such as Ferguson and Baltimore have renewed a national discussion on the racial inequalities that permeate law enforcement and the judicial system. Yet, while most have focused attention on excessive police force in black communities, Visiting Scholar Mona Lynch (UC Irvine) presents compelling new evidence that federal prosecutors have been a crucial part of the driving force behind mass incarceration—in particular, following the federal crackdown on drugs in the 1980s. As she wrote recently in an op-ed for the New York Times, "For decades, our federal court system has been quietly perpetrating some of the deepest injustices in the name of the war on drugs."
During her time in residence at the Foundation, Lynch is writing a book on how ongoing changes in federal drug sentencing laws have manifested at the local court level. Among other topics, she is examining the ways in which entrenched norms, practices, and incentives within federal courts contribute to racial disparities in drug sentencing. In a new interview, Lynch discussed her ongoing research on how drug cases are adjudicated in trial-level federal courts.
Robert Solow, the Russell Sage Foundation’s Robert K. Merton Scholar and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, joined New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and moderator Janet Gornick (Director of the Luxembourg Income Study Center and a former RSF Visiting Scholar) at the Foundation for a conversation on Inequality: What Can Be Done?, a new book by British inequality scholar Anthony B. Atkinson. In the book, Atkinson argues that economic inequality has reached unacceptable levels in many countries and lays out an agenda for reducing inequality. His policy proposals span five areas: technology, employment, the sharing of capital, taxation, and social security.
Solow and Krugman examined the desirability, viability, and feasibility of Atkinson’s policy recommendations, including whether his solutions could be achieved in the United States.
RSF author and former Visiting Scholar Rubén G. Rumbaut (UC Irvine) has been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As one of the founding members of the UC-CUBA Academic Initiative, Rumbaut is internationally known and widely cited for his research on children and young adults raised in immigrant families of diverse nationalities and socioeconomic classes. Rumbaut, who testified before the U.S. Congress at hearings on comprehensive immigration reform, was elected in 2013 to the National Academy of Education in recognition of his outstanding contributions in educational research and policy development.
Rumbaut is the co-editor of the 2003 RSF book Immigration Research for a New Century and a contributor to several RSF volumes on immigration, including The New Second Generation (1996), Handbook of International Migration (1999), and The Changing Face of Home (2006). In his time in residence at the Russell Sage Foundation during the academic year of 1997-98, Rumbaut studied the participation of children of immigrants in American educational, social and economic life. Drawing upon large bodies of research in San Diego and Miami, Rumbaut focused on the progress of Latin, Asian, and Caribbean youth. His work provided a nuanced and cross-group understanding of how these second-generation youth varied in their language and ethnic identity, school aspirations and achievement, and psychological well-being. He also explored how their adaptation was shaped by family, school, and factors like racial discrimination.
Beyond Obamacare: Life, Death, and Social Policy (2015), a new book by sociologist and public health expert James S. House, advances a provocative new analysis of America’s health care crisis. How is it possible that the United States spends more than any other nation on health care and insurance, yet has simultaneously witnessed a decline in population health relative to other wealthy—and even some developing—nations? In Beyond Obamacare, House shows that health care reforms, including the Affordable Care Act, cannot resolve this crisis because they do not focus on the underlying causes for the nation’s poor health outcomes, which are largely social, economic, environmental, psychological, and behavioral. And it is these poor health outcomes that drive America’s unparalleled spending on health care, now approaching 20% of GDP.
As House notes, socioeconomic determinants such as education and income have significant consequences for individuals’ health outcomes. For example, though mortality rates declined for the population as a whole between 1960 and 1986, they declined more rapidly among the highly educated. As the figure below shows, educational differences in death rates grew for both men and women during this time period. And, House points outs, “Analyses in Canada found much the same, even after a quarter-century of national health insurance.”
